by Sergio Pitol
In Galdós, exercises of intertextuality and meta-fiction complement and constitute each other. In The Court of Carlos IV, a complex and almost imperceptible game between Gabriel Araceli, the very young central character, and the same Gabriel sixty-something years later as he is writing his memoirs, takes place. The circumstances viewed through the eyes of the young narrator are recounted with the voice of someone who is living amazing times. On those occasions the space is covered with a bright light and that brightness endows the page’s movements with an exceptional agility. Gabriel’s complicated maneuvers to dodge the weighty commissions of comedians and aristocrats, and finally, of constables, the speed of his movements, his personal grace, the repetitive game of hide-and-seek that allows him to survive risks, inevitably evoke the quintessential page, the marvelous Cherubino, less Beaumarchais’ than Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s. The author’s sporadic interventions, in the voice of the former page turned prosperous octogenarian, exist to correct or broaden assertions made by the young protagonist, if not to inform the reader about events following the period during which the Episode takes place. In 1805, the year in which The Maidens’ Consent was published, Moratín was a living author, and even lived twenty years more in exile in Bordeaux; the judgment regarding his ignorance of Byron, Goethe, and Schiller constitutes one of the additions of the old Araceli to the past. The young Gabriel would not have been able, for obvious reasons, to make that comment. The use of more or less disguised meta-fictional techniques provide a ripple that animates the story without creating unnecessary difficulties.
In The Court of Carlos IV, the war between the dramatic schools is ubiquitous and permanent. The same happens with the comediantes; a sworn enmity reigns between those from the theater of Caños de Peral, those from the de la Cruz, and those from the del Príncipe. In the Palace, something worse is taking place: the fight to the death between the supporters of the Crown Prince and those of his royal parents. The majority of the courtiers are loyal to the Prince’s cause, while the group favorable to the King and Queen diminishes. The palace residents, both those of the noble floors as well as those on the lower floors, are protagonists of an internal struggle. Intrigue flourishes everywhere; the hatreds are Spanish, that is, frightening; only blood seems to be able to appease them. Not long after this Episode begins we meet Lesbia and Amaranta at the dinner of Pepa González; upon their arrival they pretend to be on good terms, but the allusion to the palace dispute is enough to cause the masks to fall and the hatred to present itself in its fullness.
The genre of the historical novel that Galdós writes often acquires an antiheroic tone. The characters are never the noteworthy protagonists of history, but rather everyday individuals who, for some reason, are positioned at a given time beside the noteworthy and are witness to their misfortunes. Important historical events occupy much less space in these narratives than human conflicts. The established interrelationship between real and fictional characters demands of Galdós a special novel structure, to which he must have arrived by pure instinct. The architecture of some of the Episodes is superior to that of his thesis novels written during the same period—Doña Perfecta, Gloria, The Family of León Roch—in which the stories possess a prefabricated and stiff quality, and where the action is reduced to a succession of almost always predictable scenes. In the majority of the National Episodes, the historical event is known only through the reflection projected onto the social swarm. Often that reflection illuminates incidental, almost faceless, characters who in a few sentences lend the requisite accuracy or inaccuracy to, and pass judgment on, the historical event; that participation, however, gives them a momentary face before returning to the shadows. Thanks to that wonderful institution known as the tertulia, the uniquely Spanish version of the salon, which is as vibrant as or more so than the street, history is reflected every night through a prism of a thousand faces. Everyone expresses and maintains an opinion, unleashes his passions, expresses his truth in a violently biased manner according to his stake in it, until suddenly all that remains of that historical event are words rendered unintelligible from constant rumination, quarter or half-truths, distorted shadows of great figures, faces in chiaroscuro, the suppuration of tumors of a society whose spokesmen have been, in appearance only, selected at random.
In addition to the conspiracy present in The Court of Carlos IV, there is another rather blurred event kept in the background: the march of Napoleon’s troops into Spanish territory, an event that will condition the ten Episodes of the First Series in which Galdós proposes to give us the terrifying and exciting image of French intervention in Spain and the heroic reconquista of its sovereignty won by the Spanish people. Notwithstanding the magnificent epicness of the subject, the author seems to revel in an exaggerated lack of urgency in order to approach any historical record. Only from the twelfth chapter of The Court on do we witness Gabriel Araceli enter the Palace—that is, the court of Carlos IV. Throughout all the previous chapters, we have known the exacerbation of popular passion for the Prince, the general repudiation of the King and Queen and the immeasurable hatred for Godoy, the Prince of Peace, Prime Minister of the Kingdom, and favorite of the Queen. Fernando is vested with all conceivable virtues, and the King and Queen with vices and defects in abundance, and Godoy with all the ills of the troubled kingdom. Whether in the royal premises, the palaces of the nobility, or Madrid’s most ramshackle cottages, the people yearn for change. Fernando’s popularity is able to withstand all attacks. Once the conspiracy is discovered, and the Prince faces a possible death sentence, that popularity is transmuted into worship. After having confessed his participation in the frustrated crime, begged forgiveness from the King and Queen, sworn vows of repentance, and shamefully denounced several of his friends as the true conspirators, no one in Madrid is able to believe the news. In the mind of the people, there can be only two possibilities: either that ignoble confession bears at the bottom a forged signature or, if it is authentic, it must have been extracted from the barrel of a gun pointed at his chest. In this way, Fernando adds to his many honors already won another of overwhelming force: martyrdom. The news of the advance of French troops fills the Madrileños with joy; everyone assumes that Napoleon’s intention is to rescue the Prince from the hands of his executioners and place the crown on his brow.
The morning that the news of the military invasion spreads, Araceli has gone out shopping for his mistress. Hans Hinterhäuser notes that the vitality of Galdosian characters crystallizes in not only an aesthetic but also a moral category. Gabriel’s morning walk amply demonstrates this. Each of the acquaintances he encounters is convinced—as if having heard it from the most reliable of sources—that Napoleon and his myrmidons are advancing with the purpose of ridding Spain of all its woes. The dialogical carnival takes place, the triumph of heteroglossia; Galdós grants his creatures all the space they require, giving each of them a unique and unmistakable voice to express themselves freely. Both the National Episodes and the so-called Contemporary Novels share attributes that Bakhtin identifies in Dostoevsky when coining the terms polyphony and heteroglossia. “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.”15 The novels of Galdós’s early period, written at the same time as the first two series of Episodes, represent, on the other hand, polyphonic negation; the protagonists do not participate of their own will, but rather recite a role dictated by the author. They are divided sharply into black and white, according to their political and religious convictions. The author manipulates them unscrupulously and does not allow them to develop. In the Episodes, however, perhaps because he considers them minor works, mere exercises for teaching national history, the freedom denied in those first “serial novels” is allowed.
If the tertulia—whether it takes place in a house, a casino, or a café—is the perfect venue for polyphonic flow to occur completely, the other is the street. Let us return
to Gabriel’s shopping excursion: an acquaintance of his confides to him that Napoleon has undertaken the conquest of Portugal to then give it to Spain, a country he loves, and, above all, to rid Spain of Godoy, “an impostor, insolent, lustful, deceitful, and designing.” A priest is sure that Napoleon has taken this step to punish the excesses of Godoy against the Church, and concludes that he will place the Prince of Asturias on the throne to restore abused ecclesiastical rights in the Kingdom; the playwright Luciano Francisco Comella, the unrivaled enemy of any dramatic precept, swears that Napoleon is coming to do away with Godoy, who could be forgiven for all his sins but never his protection of bad poets, giving short shrift to good, national poets, Spaniards like him, who did not accept that mishmash of ridiculous foreign precepts with which Moratín and other gaiter-clad poetasters tried to trick simpletons. Everyone vents his spleen. They agree on two points: one, that Godoy was corrupt, wasteful, immoral, an influence peddler, polygamist, enemy of the Church who, moreover, aspired to sit on the throne of the kings of Spain; and, the other, that Spain would only be happy and recover its past grandeur when the infante Fernando took the crown. Gabriel only found one person, a modest knife-grinder, who despised the delusions of the others. Neither the King and Queen nor the Prince deserved his trust. “Napoleon,” he said, “would invade the kingdom, get rid of the parents and the son, and put one of his relatives on the throne, as he had done in the other countries he had conquered,” words that produce in the page the effect of an ice water bath. The drunkenness produced by the collective rumor seemed to vanish.
As Amaranta’s servant, who lodges at the Escorial, Gabriel witnesses an extraordinary event. The day of his arrival he wanders the corridors near his mistress’s apartments in the interior of the Palace. He sees there an imposing procession returning the Prince to his room as a prisoner. The sepulchral chiaroscuro of that scene again evokes Goya.
Gabriel spends only three or four days in the Escorial—long enough to reveal to him part of the rich variety of human baseness, and for him to comprehend the foul air and minefield that are part and parcel of living off the royal family. His experience in Madrid had accustomed the young protagonist to comedians—their habits, their whims, and their weaknesses. He need only step foot in the Palace in order to witness scenes that exceed in theatricality those previously enjoyed in the theater. Except that the monarchs represented by Isidoro Máiquez seem much more dignified and majestic to him than the one who wears the true crown. The flesh and blood king turns out to be “of middle stature, thick-set with a small face and high color, and devoid of any single feature which could suggest a distinction imprinted by Nature on his physiognomy between a king of blue blood and a respectable grocer.”
The scene in which Gabriel sees him for the first time constitutes the novel’s climactic moment: the Crown Prince is being led by his father through a dark corridor dimly lit by a single candlestick. Accompanying the King and the Prince are palace guards. The conspiracy has been uncovered: Fernando has just given a statement and is led to his quarters, where he will remain from then on as a prisoner. “His anxious, gloomy face revealed the bitterness in his soul.” A palace purge has followed the arrest of the Prince. No one feels safe in the royal premises, neither gentlemen nor ladies of the court, neither officers nor servants. Gabriel witnessed several spectacular arrests and senses fear and confusion in both courtiers and servants. Everything becomes fiction, pure theater; impure theater. The edifice of the State is about to collapse, but the King, as if he were aware of nothing, entertains himself in the hunt from morning to night at the royal reserves. No member of the family seemed to serve any purpose: a proclivity for laziness and a widely cultivated ignorance render them incapable of reacting to the storm that is brewing. Palace residents move incoherently, stunned by the Prince’s confession and his betrayal. His only hope lies in the arrival of the French army, the resulting liberation of the Prince and his ascent to the throne. Hidden involuntarily behind a tapestry, Gabriel overhears a conversation between Amaranta and Queen María Luisa. The Queen implores her loyal maid to intervene with the Minister of Mercy and Justice so that Lesbia is not questioned. She knows too many secrets; she may implicate her. She may have kept letters and objects that can be presented as evidence. Her appearance in the case was to be avoided by all means necessary. Having forgotten briefly about the danger, they speak glibly about past trysts and the distribution of governmental posts or ecclesiastical benefices and sinecures. The Queen wants Godoy to grant a bishop’s miter to the uncle of her youngest son’s wet nurse; he is opposed for petty reasons, simply because the aforementioned uncle has been a contrabandist and is semiliterate. But she is going to pressure Godoy—she says boasting of her powers—to force him to sign the appointment; otherwise, the crown will refuse to ratify the secret treaty with France that would grant her favorite sovereignty over the Algarves, which the French have promised after they occupy and divide Portugal. Look, if you do not make Gregorilla’s uncle a Bishop, we will not ratify the treaty, and you will never be King of the Algarves! Only a Queen could say such things.
A complex episode in the history of Spain plays out in the house of Carlos IV: a palace revolt, a frustrated parricide, Napoleonic troops advancing on national territory; the secret treaties with Napoleon have not been ratified. Danger lurks everywhere. Life at Court at times hangs in the balance. But in the den of the Grandees of Spain nothing seems to achieve greatness. The Queen amuses herself rambling about her love affairs, the hatred she feels for those who “slander” her, the machinations she must contrive to block the path of some ladies and gentlemen who support her son’s cause, and the negotiations with her favorite. Her concept of justice slithers along the ground; the great qualities she recognizes in Caballero, the Minister of Mercy and Justice, her friend and ally, lie in his ability to conceal her indiscretions. “He is our great friend. Ever since he found a means of accusing and sending to prison the sentry and the civilian who recognized us when we went in masks to the fête of Santiago, I am greatly in his debt. Caballero does nothing but what we tell him; he is capable of making Lords of Appeal out of markers from the bullring if we ordered it. He is a capital fellow and does his duty with the docility that becomes a true minister. The poor man takes great interest in the welfare of the country.” No heroics, no true agony can thrive in this world of frightened puppets, besotted and whimpering, lacking the slightest notion of State; the welfare of the kingdom, her Majesty believes, lies in incarcerating those who have discovered her presence in an inconvenient place, and in an obedient minister, a simple accomplice, who promptly obeys her wishes.
Gabriel contemplates the scene exactly as he might follow a performance from a box at the Teatro del Príncipe; because in The Court of Carlos IV the theater as world and the world as theater appear to be one and the same. Palace life is for him so dramatic, so theatricalized, that the boundaries between the real and the fictional, the realistic and the unreal, seem to constantly blend together. Situations that could be tragic with other characters the closer they get to the circle of Carlos IV and his favorites are highly ribald. The mechanism is one of farce with piquant details. The Queen is one of the targets at which they aim; popular fury against her is unanimous—for being a libertine, predatory, a fool, ridiculous, ugly. In that theater where Gabriel has appeared, the comments he overhears accentuate the comedic toy-like character that the royal family represents. A kitchen assistant reveals to him that the Queen’s teeth are false, and she has to remove them to eat, and she doesn’t allow anyone to see. “‘You see,’ the scullion went on, ‘they are quite right in accusing the Queen of deceiving the people and trying to persuade them to believe the thing that is not. How can she expect her subjects to love a sovereign who wears other people’s teeth?’”
The only mechanism that seems to sustain him and lend an appearance of life to that rusty building is intrigue. There is no one in Court who does not scheme, from the monarchs to their grooms. And this activit
y generates a vitality, fictitious perhaps, but effective. Gabriel discovers the strength of this practice by observing the machinations of his protector: “Amaranta was not merely a cunning and intriguing woman; she was intrigue incarnate; she was the very demon of palaces—that terrible spirit which makes history, with all her sense and dignity seem sometimes the genius of mystification and mistress of falsehood—that terrible spirit which has brought confusion on our race and made nations enemies—debasing monarchies and republics alike, and despotic governments no less than free ones. She was the incarnation of that hidden machinery, of which the outer world knows nothing, but which reaches from the gates of a Palace to the King’s chambers, and on whose springs, worked by a hundred hands, depend honors, dignities, nay, life itself; the noble blood of armies, and the glory of nations. Greed, bribery, injustice, simony, arbitrary and licentious authority…”
In this world where dignity and greatness are mere appearances, the desire to be someone grows stronger in Gabriel. They may scoff at his aspirations for rank and honor, but no one will stop him. Gabriel senses that he and those like him who were born and raised in the midst of the harshest reality will eventually survive the disaster. It will be they who steer the ship we see on the verge of capsizing. Galdós seems to give his hero wings in order to soar. Forty years later, when he writes the final Episodes, his vision will be more skeptical, but, at the same time, more certain.